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Archive for the ‘Tides’ Category

All the climate propaganda is getting to some people it seems. In this case they’re not taking any chances – the ‘hills’ they are heading for turn out to be in ‘some parts as much as 11 feet (3.35 meters) above sea level’. At least they should have a commanding view of the coast. 😎

Climate change is prompting Miami’s rich to abandon the oceanfront and head for the hills, says DW.com.

That’s bad news for the people of Little Haiti, a ridge-top immigrant community suddenly sitting on hot property.

Some fairly advanced theorising here, but the possibilities look interesting. For example, could ‘resonant trapping’ exist?

Resonating oscillations of a planet’s atmosphere caused by gravitational tides and heating from its star could prevent a planet’s rotation from steadily slowing over time, according to new research by Caleb Scharf, who is the Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University.

His findings suggest that the effect is enhanced for a planet with an atmosphere that has been oxygenated by life, and the resulting ‘atmospheric tides’ could even act as a biosignature, reports Phys.org.

Cognitive Dissonance: When a person or a group of people have attitudes, beliefs or behaviors that are in conflict with each other. Generally, this produces a feeling of mental discomfort that leads to an alteration in their attitudes, beliefs or behaviors that moderates their mental discomfort and restores balance.

I believe that the level of cognitive dissonance that we have about the influence of lunar tides upon El Nino events has become so large that something has to give.

I showed that between 1870 and 2025, the precise alignments between the lunar synodic [phase] cycle and the 31/62 year Perigean New/Full moon cycle, naturally breaks up into six 31-year epochs each of which has a distinctly different tidal property. Note that the second of these 31-year intervals starts with the precise alignment on the 15th of April 1870, with the subsequent epoch boundaries occurring every 31 years after that:

A new tweak to tidal theory is proposed. The research team hopes that ‘understanding continental configurations and tidal strengths will impact the development of climate models’.

Daily tides are driven primarily by Earth’s rotation and the gravitational force of the moon on oceans, says Earth magazine.

However, in a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers suggest that tidal magnitudes are also influenced, on longer timescales, by the size and shape of the ocean basins, and are therefore driven by plate tectonics.

Plate tectonics gives rise to the formation of supercontinents — massive aggregations of continental lithosphere — which form and break apart in cycles that last about 400 million to 500 million years. With the breakup of the last supercontinent, Pangea, about 180 million years ago, and the projected formation of a new supercontinent, known as Aurica, in about 200 million years, Earth is currently in the middle of a supercontinent cycle.

Because the size and shape of ocean basins impact ocean circulation and tides, researchers led by Mattias Green, a physical oceanographer at Bangor University in England, hypothesized that tides may be linked to the supercontinent cycle in a so-called supertidal cycle.

Current tides, particularly those in the North Atlantic, are very large, Green’s team noted because of tidal resonance, which occurs when ocean basins and continental shelves reinforce and amplify the natural oscillation of tides as they sweep back and forth across oceans. “So the tides are larger at present because the continents are configured the way they are.”

To model Earth’s future oceanic tides, the researchers used predictions of continental configurations for the next 250 million years, through when Aurica is predicted to form. Ocean basin size was the main factor considered in the modeling, but the team also accounted for the moon’s gravitational pull on the oceans, Earth’s axial tilt, and simplified ocean bathymetries for future plate tectonic reconstructions.

Simplification of these fine details does affect the team’s modeling, notes David Waltham, a mathematical geologist at the Royal Holloway University of London, who was not involved in the study. But the simplifications used likely do not change the overall results, he adds.

Green and his colleagues reported that global tides are likely to increase over the next 50 million years “due to an enhanced tide in the North Atlantic and Pacific at 25 million years, followed by a very large Pacific tide at 50 million years.”

Nature reverses its own vanishing trick on the western Irish coast. The ‘freak tide’ seems to have lasted ten days.

An entire Irish beach that was washed away 33 years ago has reappeared – virtually overnight thanks to a freak tide, as ITV News reports.

The beach near the village of Dooagh, on Achill Island, vanished in storms in 1984 when waves washed away all the sand. Almost all the village’s hotels, guesthouses and cafes shut down because all that was left was rocky terrain.

Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of sand were dumped on the beach over ten days in April during a freak tide, re-creating a 300m-long beach.

That’s the view of the GWPF, as explained below. Whether the UK government will be put off by the huge cost of the subsidies remains to be seen.

Mr Hendry’s report implicitly recommending that the UK government support the £1.3 billion Swansea Tidal Lagoon project presumably moves the scheme one step closer to realisation.

However, the headline facts show that there is no justification for compelling UK consumers to de-risk the scheme for its projectors.

The principal and overwhelming disadvantage of most renewable electricity technologies is that they are of low energy productivity in themselves and reduce the productivity of the electricity system of which they are a part.(more…)

Our recent conference held at Conway Hall in central London was a huge success, with over a hundred attendees being treated to two days of rapid-fire 20 minute presentations and discussion sessions. The footage has now been published online by Mark Windows, and are available for you to view at your leisure.

Another video Mark has produced, introduces the circumstances around the last-minute move from UCL to Conway hall, and also presents interviews with many of the participants.

Heard it before? Questions to be addressed include the economics of this type of project and the long-term reliability of the technology in corrosive seawater. Similar previous attempts have not got very far.

A fully assembled 1.5 MW Atlantis tidal power turbine with foundations was unveiled today at a ceremony is Nigg before being loaded onto a jack-up vessel and transported to the MeyGen for installation.

It’s finally happening. Thanks to Herculean efforts by Niklas Morner, we are presenting a two-day conference in central London on the 8-9th September. Speakers are coming from all over the world to present their work, and it is not to be missed!

Take the 8-9th September off work and join us for this historic event. The first UK climate conference in decades which will counter the scaremongering of the IPCC with a cool, rational approach to the study of climate change, presenting alternative explanations, new data, theory and commentary. Topics include solar-planetary theory, causes of ENSO, sea ice extent, sea level, ozone depletion, volcanos, regional forecasting, journal gatekeeping and many more.

The list of contributors is long, we are packing a huge number of presentations into this two day event. Speakers include Niklas Morner, myself, Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller, Nicola Scafetta, Per Strandberg, Jan-Erik Solheim, and thats before lunch on day one! Piers Corbyn will be there! So will Christopher Monckton! See the full programme and the extended abstracts in this 35 Megabyte document for full details. There are also some travel and booking details on the geoethic.com website. An updated version is available on reseachgate

A new paper is in the works from a group of mainstream solar physics theorists who work with dynamo models. It explores the possibility that the Sun’s dynamo is modulated by planetary motion – something we’ve been working on here at the talkshop for the last six years. It finds that the gravitational interaction of the motions of Venus, Earth and Jupiter (VEJ) could be involved with both the 11.07 and 22.14 Schwabe and Hale solar cycles.

I’m not going to post the paper yet, as it is still undergoing peer review at a major journal, but I thought it would be fun to provide a teaser. Here’s part of the bibliography. If you look at the top and bottom references, they are to papers by Nicola Scafetta and Ian Wilson which were published in our special edition of Pattern Recognition in Physics at the end of 2013.

Willy de Rop of the Royal Observatory of Belgium wrote a paper entitled ‘A tidal period of 1800 years’ in 1971 about tides and the motion of the Moon. It generated some interest and was referred to in at least one other paper, but on closer consideration leads to some ideas we can put forward here.

The opening paragraph states:‘The Swedish oceanographer O. Pettersson
has presented evidence indicating that the last
maximum of oceanic tides occurred about 1433.
He pointed out that there is a coincidence
between a tidal period of 1800 years and climatic
changes of the same period. We think we
can explain this period as follows.’

This article is of general interest without declaring any particular position. I hope it is interesting.

A few days ago Roger reblogged an article from MalagaBay about the sea level stand near Almayate, a small southern Spanish town 150km east of Gibraltar, 15km east of Malaga port, close to Velez-Malaga, a near coastal town on the Velez river. The most western Medeterrainin is called the Alboran Sea.

The Med is landlocked, has a very small tidal range but in consequence is prone to air pressure and wind modulation of stand, as well as fresh water incursion from rainfall. Moreover there much volcanic activity with severe crustal movement, sea bed change. In a way related the region is seismic with major tectonic faults also able to alter crustal stand.

There are in effect two Malaga’s

Figure 1, Malaga port tide gauge, this is the place commonly known as Malaga.

PMSL carry no other useful tide gauge data in the region, all other records are very brief, although eg. Gibraltar must have a very long naval record but at the entrance to a large sea from an ocean the data would be strange.

This record is suspicious as though something has changed ~1990. In my experience this sort of station change is likely to be ground subsidence. A good case was found for Perth, Australia where deep aquifer pumping led to false claim of rapid sea level rise. (unpublished work by the author)

Relevant to current discussions on the talkshop concerning changes in Earth’s length of day (LOD) and the effect of planetary orbital resonances on the Moon’s orbital parameters and Earth climatic variation; this is a repost from Ian Wilson’s excellent Astro-Climate-Connection website. Ian very generously opens with a hat tip to this blog, (at which he is one of the ‘collaborators’ he mentions).

[(*) Some of the findings in this blog post concerning the connection between the Earth’s rotation rate and the planetary configurations have also been independently discovered by Rog “Tallbloke” Tattersall and his collaborators]

A. The Connection Between Extreme Pergiean Spring Tides and Long-term Changes in the Earth’s Rotation Rate as Measured by the Rate-of-Change of its Length-of-Day (LOD). (*)

If you plot the rate of change of the Earth’s Length of Day (LOD) [with the short-term atmospheric component removed] against time [starting in 1962] you find that there is a ~ 6 year periodicity that is phase-locked with the 6 year period that it takes the lunar line-of-nodes to re-align with the lunar line-of-apse [see the first note directly below and reference [1] for a description of the method used to determine the time rate of change of LOD].

NB: The pro-grade precession of the lunar line-of-apse once around the Earth with respect to the stars takes 8.8504 Julian years (J2000) while the retrograde precession of the lunar line-of-apse line-of-nodes once around the Earth with respect to the stars takes 18.6000 Julian years (J2000). Hence, the lunar line-of-apse and the ascending node of the lunar line-of-nodes will realign once every:

Lozier, Susan (2010). Deconstructing the conveyor belt. Science 328, 1507-1511.http://sites.duke.edu/mslozier/files/2010/11/Lozier_2010.pdf
=
”
Though appealing in its simplicity, the ocean conveyor-belt paradigm has lost luster over the years […] the ocean’s eddy field, unaccounted for just decades ago […] figures prominently in the dismantling of the conveyor-belt paradigm. Another player in this dismantling is the ocean’s wind field. The traditional assignation of surface ocean gyres to wind-forcing and overturning to buoyancy forcing has ignored the vital impact of winds on overturning pathways and mechanics. […] the conveyor-belt model no longer serves the community well […] because it ignores crucial structure and mechanics of the ocean’s intricate global overturning.

[…] wind forcing, rather than buoyancy forcing, can play a dominant role in changing the transport of the overturning […]

I may be boring folks yet detail is what breaks to understanding. This is rather fun, things fit.

UK extremes

Parameter

Location

Value

Highest maximum temperature

Gravesend

14.1 °C

Lowest maximum temperature

Pennerley

5.7 °C

Lowest minimum temperature

South Newington

-2.0 °C

Highest rainfall

Redesdale Camp

19.8 mm

Sunniest

Leconfield

6.0 hours

Issued at: 2303 on Tue 04 Nov 2014

Hourly data, a peak temperature which elsewhere seems to coincide with a short period of high visibility, probably sunshine. But look at the green wind data trace, falling west wind, calm, east wind then resume west. Humidity drops low. The station is on a tidal estuary.

The estimate tide from various web sites at Gravesend-Broadness was low tide at 16 hours but the PLA chart for Tilbury which is 2km downstream is 0.76 m @ 17:10 hrs

Prolific solar-planetary scientist and long-time talkshop friend Nicola Scafetta has a new paper published in Physica A entitled ‘Global temperatures and sunspot numbers. Are they related? Yes, but non linearly. A reply to Gil-Alana et al. (2014)’ which comments on Gil-Alana et al 2014; a paper purporting to dismiss any correlation between solar activity and terrestrial surface temperature. Nicola gently points out the limitations of their methods and patiently explains how the astronomical-solar signal can be found in the data. Here is Figure 3 to whet your appetite:

Fig. 3. (A) Annually solved HadCRUT3 global surface temperature record [34] from 1850 to 2013. (B) Power spectrum density functions calculated using the MEM method (using M = N/2 = 82) and the MTM periodogram f (p) [35,36]: the calculations were made with the SSA–MTM Toolkit. Several spectral peaks (e.g.: at about 9.1, 10.4, 20 and 60 yr) are statistically significant above the 95% confidence level, and their solar, lunar and astronomical origin is explained in the literature (e.g.: Scafetta [10,32,33,25]).

Nicola also provides plots of several of the various solar and temperature related indices and techniques for representing them over a wide range of timescales which clearly demonstrate the plain fact of the close coherence between the activity of our host star which supplies all our energy, and the fluctuations of the lovely moderate temperatures we live in on the surface of our planet.

While browsing Ian Wilson’s excellent Astro-Climate Connection blog, I found a graphic showing the coincidence of El Nino with the alignment of the Lunar line of nodes (declination cycle) and line of apse (orbital precession), with the Sun. I’ve taken the liberty of adding my Solar – El Nino hypothesis to it: the proposal is that El Nino tends to be initiated as the cycle starts to decline steeply and initiated again at solar minimum as it ‘bottom’s out’. I’ll reproduce Ian’s accompanying text below the break but to get to the point, here’s the result:

I’m of the opinion that before getting into the complexity of numerical modelling, it’s wise to put considerable effort into trying to understand the physical processes at work in the climate system, and the origins of the energy flows that drive them. David Evans’ recent series of posts over at Jo Nova’s site have generated a lot of interesting discussion (despite being roundly ignored by Anthony Watts at WUWT), and I think we can shed some light on the ‘mysterious 11yr lag’ between solar input and climate response.